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Dr. Mac's OS X Tip-of-the-Day
"You want it. You need it. Mac OS X loves it... But how much RAM do you really
need to run Mac OS X properly? The Dr. Mac Tip-of-the-Day has the story"
By BOB LEVITUS
Thursday's Dr. Mac Tip-of-the-Day is brought to you by the makers of...
RAM
You want it. You need it. Mac OS X loves it. Here's why more is better...
According to Apple:
To use Mac OS X, you will need...at least 128MB of physical RAM.
Ha. Sure you will. But if you intend to use more than one or two
programs at a time you need more than that. A lot more.
One of the keys to coaxing the best performance out of Mac OS X is to
give it plenty of RAM. The more you have, the less sluggish things feel
regardless of your processor's speed.
Mac OS X is kind of insidious about this. Unlike Mac OS 9, you'll never
(almost never) see a "not enough memory to do that" type message. Mac OS X
uses its own superior virtual memory scheme to allow you to run programs
far beyond what can fit in that 128MB of RAM. But... (there's always a
but...)
The way it does that trick is to "page out" parts of RAM to your hard
disk, substituting space on your hard disk for the RAM you so
desperately need. The thing is, RAM, being solid-state, is about
seventeen thousand trillion times faster than any mechanical disk. And
so, the more paging out you've got going on, the slower things get in Mac OS X.
As I told you a few Freeware Friday's ago in this space, the easy way to
find out how much paging out is going on at any given time is to run
MemoryStick (http://homepage.mac.com/mattneub/FileSharing1.html) with
its Signal Pageouts option turned on. The more beeping you hear, the
more additional RAM will speed up your particular Mac.
If you haven't heard of RamSeeker.com (http://www.ramseeker.com/), now
you have. It's an independent Web site that compares prices for RAM from
several dozen vendors on the Internet. When I wrote this tip a week or
two ago, the average prices were:
64mb - $16.00 128mb - $35.00 256mb - $65.00 512mb - $115.00
How much do you need? Well, it's better to err to the generous side. So
I'm going to say that 384mb is a bare minimum for most users, and if you
like to have a lot of programs running at a time, like me (I've got 17
running right now, and that's just the ones that display a dock icon!),
you need even more than that.
I recently tried using a Power Macintosh Dual 1-Gigahertz with "only"
512MB. Of course it rocked, but when I stuffed an additional gigabyte of
RAM into it (which, incidentally, due to the Power Mac's awesome design
took less than 2 minutes), it rocked a lot more and it rocked a lot
faster.
So that's today's tip--buy more RAM. And no, I don't own stock in the RAM
makers. Today's advice is for your own good. Really.
To discuss this tip (or anything you like) in Dr. Mac's OSXFAQ Forum,
click here:
http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?topic=511&forum=100
Bob LeVitus is a leading authority on Mac OS and the author of 37 books, including
Mac OS X For Dummies and The Little iTunes Book.
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